Dashboards are a favorite topic in Excel for many people, including me. This post is just an introduction to Excel dashboards and focuses on the mechanics of creating a basic dashboard in Excel.

When you design your Excel workbook, it is best to keep things separate. For example, have a sheet for the data. Put your Data sheet as the last sheet. Have separate sheets for each of your Pivot Tables. Put your Pivot Chart on the same sheet as your Pivot Table. Put your Dashboard on a separate sheet and move it to the beginning of the list of sheets.

Dashboards have a history. Originally they used to be called Executive Information Systems (EIS) which were first created in the 1980’s. During the 1990’s, data warehousing, online analytical processing (OLAP), and eventually Business Intelligence (BI) were popular. Later in the 90’s, key performance indicators became popular. People became interested in not just financial metrics (numbers or measures), but also in business performance metrics and the Balanced Scorecard. Many software vendors supply dashboard software. Here is a partial list: SAP, Oracle, Hyperion, Cognos, Visual Mining, General Electric, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Power BI and Tableau.

Dashboard Components in Excel

To build a dashboard in Microsoft Excel you need Tables, Pivot Tables, and Pivot Charts.

Learn with YouTube

Here is a YouTube video by Kevin Stratvert called How to Build Excel Interactive Dashboards. It is under 20 minutes long.

Here is a video that is more detailed than the previous one by Mynda Treacy from MyOnlineTrainingHub.com. It is called How to build Interactive Excel Dashboards that Update with ONE CLICK! It is about 52 minutes long. It focusses on the steps in building a dashboard, not the initial design of dashboards.

Here below is a screenshot of a dashboard I built with my own much-simplified data, but was inspired by the above-mentioned video by Mynda Treacy. It needs a few final formatting touch-ups, but thanks to Mynda’s video, it looks pretty good.

The above dashboard is dynamic and interactive. On the left side are two slicers that the use can click on to change the charts to show only those pieces of data they wish to see.

Here is another video by Mynda Treacy called Interactive Excel Dashboards with Power Query and Power Pivot – FREE Download.

A video from Mynda Treacy called Excel Stock Portfolio Dashboard – FREE File Download. You will need Microsoft 365 to get this project to work. It uses Excel and the STOCKHISTORY function and stock data types to get updated data.

Here is another video by Mynda Treacy called Can You Believe This is Excel?! Dashboard from Start to Finish (INCL. FILE DOWNLOAD)! This is a dark theme dashboard.